How To Hold A Baby With One Hand

The baby is born, and a new life begins. Actually, that's not quite accurate: three new lives begin. You will probably want to harm anyone who tells you that things will never be the same again, although they speak the truth. Just how different your life will be we shall address in the next few posts.

How To Hold A Baby With One Hand

The learning curve is steep, but you should be able to negotiate it with crampons and a good strong harness. As it happens, mountaineering and childrearing have much in common: they are not for the faint-hearted and there's a lot of expensive equipment to buy. And amazingly, some people do them both for fun.

The baby is born, and it's got your nose. Folk wisdom tells us that the first child will look more like the father than the mother - this is nature's way of reassuring him that he is indeed the father. However much you trust your partner, however carefully you have kept her locked up in a dungeon wearing a belt for the past five years, your first instinct as a new father will be to check that the baby looks like you. This is not as daft as it sounds. Around a tenth of British babies, it is thought, do not have the father everyone thinks they have. And yet a hundred per cent of new fathers are told by relatives and friends, "He/she's got your nose." People want to believe. But more than that, they want you to believe - even if the evidence (baby is the wrong colour, or has strange pointy ears) suggests otherwise. 

Here are a few more thoughts that will pour unbidden into your exhausted mind:

• "It's so small."
• "It's so big."
• "How on earth did it get out of there?"

The sheer oddness of birth hits everyone. This is a routine, daily occurrence, but when you see it for yourself, it seems weird, starfling, miraculous. Hold the baby in your arms, if you dare. This tiny little person, a stranger to everyone, has emerged fully formed with an operating personality and two big eyes, which it is now probably training on its mother's breasts. As well as being very small, it is also huge, having somehow worked its way down the birth canal with the minimum of assistance. All this is almost too much to take in at once, which is why all you can think at the moment is: I'd better not drop it.
 
This, too, is normal. All new fathers are obsessed with not dropping the baby. I have never seen this mentioned in any of the books, but it's our overwhelming concern. Most of us have never held a newborn baby before. Most of us have fled the house rather than hold a newborn baby. But you can't avoid holding your own.

So what if you do drop it? First, you will establish whether or not it bounces. As it happens, small babies are remarkably resilient. There are countless tales of newborns falling great heights and suffering little more than minor bruising. Not that you should test this out. Babies don't like being used as projectiles and, indeed, there are laws against it. So try not to drop your baby - in much the same way that you don't drop newspapers, cups of tea and bottles of milk every day of your life.

Because now you'll be holding the baby every day of your life as well.

Luckily, small babies don't do a huge amount. Holding them is very easy. The big surprise is how floppy they are. Newborn babies have 360 bones (adults have just 206). But there's no strength there yet. The neck muscles are noticeably non-functional: you'll probably have to hold the baby's body with one hand and its head with the other. With practice - i.e. in about half an hour- you will be able to hold the baby in the crook of one arm, leaving one hand free to operate heavy machinery. To find out more, you can check out How To Hold A Baby With One Hand.